


Very Sincerely

by Sheepnamedpig



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Betrayal, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Jim is his sidekick, John is Moriarty, John vs Mycroft, Loyalty, Minor Character Death, Sometimes the bad guys win, Terrorism, War Profiteering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 13:19:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheepnamedpig/pseuds/Sheepnamedpig
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Life and Times and Rivalry of John Hamish Watson nee Hamish "James" Moriarty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Very Sincerely

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: John is the real Moriarty and has been playing Sherlock for a chump
> 
> Unbeta'd

The Watsons find him on their doorstep, swaddled in a threadbare blanket. Tucked in the folds is a sealed envelope addressed  _To Hamish, when he is grown._

_Hamish_ , they say,  _what an old-fashioned name. Let Hamish be his middle name, and we'll call him John._

&&&

John Hamish is a brilliant child, so brilliant that his parents worry about him attending school with the normal children. After a few weeks, he seems to settle in, to adjust, to descend to the intellectual level of his peers and his adoptive parents breathe a little sigh of relief.

John  _is_ brilliant, knows that he's far and away more intelligent than the other children, but it's so  _easy_ to be brilliant. It's much more challenging and interesting to pretend to be normal. So John pretends, examining and mimicking the behaviour of his classmates, extrapolating what the teacher expects to see and honing his performance with all the dedication and skill of a trained actor.

The library becomes a haven for him, a place of real learning, where endless information about every subject under the sun waits for his curious eyes. Astronomy, economy, law, psychology.

Medicine.

John is eight years old when he decides he wants to become a doctor. After all, why go looking for a puzzle when there's an infinitely complex one right under his skin?

&&&

John reads and learns and occasionally does his homework and graduates a carefully calculated eighth in his class. He's glad to go to London for uni; dissecting the local strays and the has gotten terribly boring and the police have started noticing the steadily decreasing number of homeless in the community. They'll never find the bodies of course, but the patrols and raised awareness make it harder to move unseen.

So he goes to London, luggage in one hand and a letter in the other.

_To Hamish, when he is grown_

It doesn't contain much, just a name, a phone number, and an account number. The name, Hamish Moriarty, is his, the phone number belongs to a man he later learns is a criminal, and the account has a great deal of money left in his name.

John calls the number. When the man at the other end asks who is calling, John considers,  _Hamish-Anglicized form of Seumas, Scottish variant of James-Iacomus, Iakobos, Ya'aqov, Moriarty-noble, illustrious, Gaelic-from Mor, great, exalted_ , and answers,

“This is James Moriarty speaking.”

Between medicine and crime, between John Hamish Watson and James Moriarty, he stays very busy.

&&&

Little Jimmy is just a punk. A smart punk, an insane punk with more audacity than sense, but a punk nonetheless. Still, he has promise, so James takes Jimmy under his wing, teases and tugs at that tangled mind until it unravels in his hands and then carefully re-knots it, tucking away all the flaws and exposing all the brilliance and hiding away in its twisted centre an unbreakable tie of loyalty woven from threads of awe and fear.

Little Jimmy becomes his puppet, his carefully controlled right hand, his public face, and in return James gives Jimmy his last name, accepts Jimmy into a family that doesn't exist.

They become James and Jim Moriarty. The organized and disorganized crime of Europe falls like so many dominoes under their campaign.

&&&

M is very good at hiding, but John is very patient. Most people think in terms of days and weeks, but men like them think in terms of years and decades. John knows this and knows that M will never be satisfied with the limited influence of the minor government position he currently holds. M will rise to the more sparsely populated ranks of the truly influential and when that happens, John will be watching.

Until then, James Moriarty must disappear, because James Moriarty is also very good at hiding, but M is also very good at hunting. His dogs have already scented Jim and are giving chase and James doesn't intend to stick around in Europe long enough to be spotted by M's hunting party.

War is brewing in the Middle East, so John packs up his degree and goes to the nearest recruiter. He leaves Jim in charge of Europe and boards a plane for Afghanistan, his address book thick with the names of arms dealers and crime kingpins.

&&&

John loves war. James Moriarty loves the Middle East's underworld. He loves the deserts, the atmosphere of chaos, the gritty determination of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict, and the easily manipulatable fanaticism of their respective leaders.

M, sensing the change in Moriarty's criminal empire, takes a swing at the organization. It makes an appreciable dent, but nothing crippling. James and Jim strike back with a few well-timed bombs detonated in London's underground.

One of M's best and brightest dies on July 7 th . In the pocket of her trousers, M finds a note:

_Stay out of my way or you will find yourself rather badly burned. Very sincerely, James Moriarty_

After that, M leaves them be, choosing to keep an eye on Jim and contain the organization by snipping away at its edges.

It's a little more challenging to conquer the Middle East by himself while simultaneously fighting in a war, but John lives for a challenge and isn't above passing intel to strategically placed generals when the locals aren't cooperating.

The Middle East's vast criminal network falls to James Moriarty with the generous assistance of NATO.

In 2009, John gets shot. The army invalids him home, but not before he establishes a regional Board of Directors to run his Middle Eastern and North African operations. The board calls him the Alexander of Crime, after Alexander the Great. It's a bit flattering. He boards the plane, left arm in a sling, and watches Afghanistan fall away beneath him.

&&&

London is miserable. Dealing with an uppity Jim is equally miserable. John misses Afghanistan and his therapist is an idiot.

M is the only thing that brightens the monotony of the days after his return. He's even better at hiding than he had been, and an even more skilful hunter than John remembers.

James lets Jim loose on Europe. Jim, grown too independent to blindly follow James' lead and too bored to manage the daily grind of a criminal empire, is only too glad to run amok, calling himself a 'consulting criminal', whatever that means. Jim distracts M, which allows James to extend cautious feelers into the upper echelons of the British bureaucracy. It becomes a game of Grandmother's Footsteps, with M taking swipes at Jim while James sneaks up behind him, and James freezing whenever M peeks back over his shoulder.

John tells his therapist that nothing ever happens to him. This is technically true. But that's only because he's too good at what he does to get caught.

&&&

Sherlock Holmes is hilarious. John would laugh if it didn't mean breaking his carefully crafted façade of normalcy. Sherlock is brilliance heaped on even more brilliance, but he has the attention span of an infant and no discipline whatsoever. Still, it's not healthy to stay indoors and conquer the world from his laptop, so he chases Sherlock around London, stumping along on his metal cane and pretending,  _always, always pretending, getting so tired of pretending_ , to be just a shred above normal.

A phone rings. John ignores it. Anyone who really needs to contact him knows to go through Jim.

A second phone rings. Two data points is enough to graph a basic line. Someone else picks it up before he does, though, and he moves on.

Third time's the charm. John picks up the ringing phone in the booth and is not impressed by the caller's little CCTV trick. He is, however, a little impressed that he doesn't actually know  _who_ it is that's trying to impress him, so he gets in the black sedan without fuss.

John realizes immediately that this man, whoever he is, is actually talking to  _John Hamish Watson_ , not James Moriarty, about  _Sherlock Holmes,_ whose existence is only just interesting enough to register as a blip on John's radar. It's quite a novel experience. There's the usual song and dance of two aggressors sizing each other up and John whittles down the list of people that this man might be.

The man attempts to intimidate, but James Moriarty has met men who can do subtle menace with much more skill and panache than this man. The man offers money. John wants to scoff. As James Moriarty, he has access to more money than the UK can muster with its entire GDP.

The man says “Trust issues, it says here,” and John knows. He tilts his head to the side, looking up at the taller man. He hadn't expected M to be quite so tall.

M does not disappoint. Ever the keen-eyed hunter, he sees in the stillness of John's left hand what his trained psychiatrist had missed over hours of conversation. And yet, John feels a little bit dismayed, because he's done such a good job of hiding himself that M doesn't even realize that he has just met his one worthy enemy. John plays along with M's little game, letting M tug his marionette strings and providing just the right amount of resistance, pretending, pretending, always pretending to be normal, to be average, and when he gets back into the sedan he flirts with the pretty PA because that's what M expects John to do and John  _always_ lives up to expectations.

John is tempted to feel disillusioned, but M's concern for Sherlock Holmes is a tempting puzzle that he chips away at as the night progresses.

The revelation that Sherlock Holmes is M's – _Mycroft Holmes'--_ brother is like Christmas come early. Finally, bloody hell  _finally_ , he has something that he can use to bring M—Mycroft,  _Mycroft Holmes_ to heel.

&&&

Jim is ecstatic these days, like a girl finally in a relationship with the boy she'd had a crush on for ages and ages. His joy is infectious and James happily grants him permission to expand operations into Asia. It promises to be a bigger challenge than anything Jim has previously attempted, but he does well and James looks on proudly as China's deeply entrenched organized crime learns to look on the Moriarty empire with respect and a little bit of fear.

And so, James is infuriated when Mycroft inflicts a well-aimed blow to Jim's fledgling East Asian operations. He hunts down Mycroft's pretty PA himself and strangles her with a piano wire, typing a note for Mycroft on her omnipresent Blackberry.

_This is your second warning. Don't doubt that I will burn you. Very sincerely, James Moriarty_

&&&

John has never been properly kidnapped before, and aside from the absolutely galling irony that  _he_ has been mistaken for the likes of  _Sherlock Holmes_ , it's quite fun. John especially enjoys the part where he has to save the damsel in distress while the sandbag timer ticks gram by gram to zero. The whole thing plays out like a Bond film or something equally camp, and after all is said and done, James has a few stern words with Jim regarding the quality of their Asian associates and the reputation those associates are expected to live up to.

Jim accepts responsibility with what looks on the surface to be fanatical devotion, but James has been a pretender too long to _not_ notice the grudging reluctance Jim is hiding.

&&&

Irene Adler appears in the news. John does a little research on her and arranges for Jim's number to be passed along to her. He'll later be grateful that he did.

The next day, CIA operatives take down half of James' Middle Eastern Board of Directors. It's the work of a moment to replace them and get the branch back on track, but it's a good excuse to bring Mycroft under his thumb. While Sherlock is in Minsk, James and Jim meet and engineer a plan to put Mycroft in his place.

&&&

The plan goes like clockwork. Mycroft goes to Sherlock with the theft of the Bruce-Partington Project, who foists it off on John, who puts on an ugly suit and plays dumb at Mycroft, who is apparently so unconcerned that he has time to get dental work done. Meanwhile, Jim and Sherlock play cat and mouse through London, Sherlock jumping through flaming hoops on command like he's been training for it his whole life. It's like one of Shakespeare's comedies, and it all culminates at the pool where little Jimmy the punk killed Carl Powers and got away with it.

John hops into a van parked in a CCTV blind spot and shares a grin with Jim. The uppity little brat intends to betray him tonight; John intends to let him. It'll make little Jimmy's punishment that much more painful.

&&&

_Catch. You. Later._

_No you wo~on't!_

Jim walks out, right on schedule. James makes his leg buckle in pretend relief and Sherlock all but rips the explosives off of him.

Jim walks back in, also right on schedule. James lets a wave of pretend rage well up behind his mask of pretend ex-army courage and calmly watches Jim gloat, counting down the seconds until his clever little contingency plan activates.

There's a tense stand-off between the two. John knows them both quite well, can predict what they're going to say before they say it with almost perfect accuracy. John thinks again that they're really quite well matched. They're both brilliant and unpredictable and so incredibly easy to manipulate.

Jim's phone rings, right on schedule. If John was a religious man, he'd thank the Lord for Irene Adler.

Camera footage of the pool stand-off and a note tucked into the explosive vest make their way to Mycroft.

_Consider this your last warning. I expect you to behave from now on. Very sincerely, James Moriarty_

&&&

Jim avoids John almost religiously, contacting him via email only when absolutely necessary and obeying John's orders to the letter when John gives them. The anticipation of the punishment might be said to be as bad as the punishment, but John has something very specific in mind for Jim that'll take that rebellious wind right out of his sails.

By day, he faithfully chronicles Sherlock's cases. By night, he plants rumours that Jim Moriarty is crafting the perfect electronic skeleton key. After a few months of rumourmongering, he takes a metaphorical step back and releases the lie into the wild, letting it grow and evolve as only rumours can.

John doesn't hear about the Düsseldorf plan until the last minute, but he nicks one of the corpses and drives it out to Surrey just to needle Mycroft. John had never thought of typing as fun by itself, but “Sherlock Holmes Baffled” is definitely the highlight of his day, tickling his fingertips as he taps out the letters.

Irene Adler appears on the news again. John is looking forward to meeting her in person.

&&&

Irene Adler is very beautiful and very intelligent. She and Sherlock would make incredible offspring if only either of them were interested. She's not perfect, of course, already too caught up in the game even though it's only just started, and that's enough for John to lose interest in her.

She's not much, not without his and Jim's help, but at least she's funny.

&&&

John watches the footage of Adler's execution with a touch of regret. She and Sherlock really would've made spectacular children. He puts a copy of the video in the file bound for Mycroft. It had been a bit of a challenge keeping his own terrorist cell hidden from both Mycroft and Sherlock, but they'd stayed hidden until the Holmeses and their respective coteries had cleared out before catching Adler again and giving her a proper beheading. The head was on ice somewhere, tucked away for a rainy day.

He picks up his phone and texts Jim.

_Ask him about Sherlock's past, would you?_

There's no reply, but James figures Jim is a little busy with the MI-5 operatives that just knocked on his door.

&&&

When Jim gets out, John goes to see him in person.

Jim looks smaller, his already thin frame leached of health almost to the point of emaciation. The brilliant mind behind those endlessly black eyes is cracked even more than usual, cracked to the point that a firm blow would shatter it altogether. John looks past all that, looks into the very core of Jim to that tie of loyalty that had begun to fray, and finds it renewed and strengthened, stronger than it was when John had first placed it there.

John takes Jim in his arms and cradles him, whispers pretty words of forgiveness and the promise of brotherly devotion into his ears, and knows that Jim will never betray him again.

&&&

John was the one who threw Jim and Mycroft into each others' paths, but he'd underestimated his enemy. James had expected Jim to come out stronger, his brilliant madness tempered and honed by his encounter with a superior foe the same way he'd been energized and inspired by his tête-à-tête with Sherlock. But John had miscalculated, had underestimated, and at some point what was meant to be a trial by fire became a siege by ice. Jim is ever so brittle now.

James supposes the cracks might heal with time, but he'll need to buy that time from Mycroft.

James thinks that thirty pieces of silver will suffice.

&&&

Jim rallies his strength for the last plot. Together they plant the seeds that will lead to Sherlock's fall from grace. A few strategically placed allies, a call to an unscrupulous reporter looking for her big break, a few falsified documents about a man who never existed, and they're on their way.

The morning of their big day, John sends Jim a customised iPhone with Rossini's “The Thieving Magpie”.

The robberies go off without a hitch, as does the trial. John's meeting with Mycroft is almost depressingly predictable and the kidnapping case is so easily solved it's really not worth thinking up a witty moniker for. It all goes down so easily, so easily that John wonders how Sherlock hasn't already fallen under the weight of his own ego.

John's second meeting with Mycroft is an exercise in control. It's difficult not to blow his own cover and say  _I warned you_ but the play's not over yet. Sherlock still has just a little farther to fall until he reaches that permanent destination.

When John gets the phone call about Mrs. Hudson, he leaves as obediently as a lamb. He'd like to stay and watch Jim's last confrontation with Sherlock, wants to see Sherlock's expression when Jim tells him the truth about the keycode, but it's not James' place. No, this last confrontation belongs to Jim.

John has gotten so good at making plans that he'd forgotten the golden rule: The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry.

&&&

_Good morning, Mr. Holmes_ .

_What do you want, Moriarty?_

_Just to say 'I warned you'._

_A rather Pyrrhic victory, don't you think? After all, you lost your brother just as surely as I lost mine._

_Wrong in every particular. Jim wasn't my brother. Moriarty wasn't even his real last name. And I lost him when you broke him._

_You sent him to me._

_I underestimated you. Congratulations. It won't happen again._

_What do you want from me?_

_Your word that you'll stay out of my way._

_Or what? What do I have left to lose?_

_Everything. Everyone you know, everyone that knew the real Sherlock, everything you've ever accomplished, everything that you might still accomplish. And your life, I suppose, though I usually try not to make such pedestrian threats._

_Fine. You win. I forfeit the game._

_You mean that?_

_Very sincerely._


End file.
